


This Time, They Don't Meet

by SloanGreyMercyDeath



Series: Light Summer, Dark Summer [2]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Exclusively Backstory, F/F, Loneliness, Longing, a hat, and
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 15:58:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13639521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SloanGreyMercyDeath/pseuds/SloanGreyMercyDeath
Summary: Root stands on a hill overlooking the ocean, her white dress whipping around her, as she stares out into the sea. Shaw lives on a boat, more rust than metal, thinking about her blood-soaked fingers and listening to the wind that comes over the hill.





	This Time, They Don't Meet

**Author's Note:**

> They all begin the same. One thing changes and it all changes.

There are places where time moves differently. It can race through cities, bouncing off walls and windows, streaking through underground tunnels, gaining speed until years pass by in minutes and progress never stops. It can crawl across prairies, walking beside antelopes, sleeping between wooden planks and lazily swimming in water towers, slow and steady and nothing ever changes.

Here, on this hill, towering above that shoreline, it saturates the air. It stings your eyes like salt, hovers in the sky like the charge of lightning, lingers in the sand waiting for the ocean to sweep it away. Every grain of sand holds a minute and every time the ocean steals one, it gives two back. No one lives here. They stay here.

The people in this hillside town couldn’t tell you when they are; they count the time in generations and fishing seasons and influential storms. The stores and houses and barns are pale with wear, old and faded and still. They whisper stories and promises and memories when the wind blows through their splintered walls.

It only takes a blink to get to the ocean from the sign that hangs above the edge of town. Three steps from the sign and the rocky ground becomes sand and you sink. It requires speed, the sandy path, and, when people travel to the shore, they lift their skirts or coats or cloaks and run as fast as they can. The sand that holds minutes pushes them onward, even as it tries to pull them back. The hard water stops the journey with a splash and the cold, crisp shock freezes them in place.

There’s a pier that stands proud against the murky water. Where it starts and the sand ends is unclear, but if you know what you’re looking for, you can always find it. One step on the boards and it creaks, singing the song of something trapped between land and sea, beckoning you out into the unending waves. Boats come and go, but there is always someone there. Whether they are waiting to leave, or longing to stay, it’s impossible to tell, but if you look to the shore, you will find a voyager.

It’s a big ocean, the kind that makes you feel small and vast and infinite and finite all at the same time. It stretches out forever and the horizon is fuzzy through a haze of perpetual storms. When you’re on the water, on a small fishing boat that is made of rust and respect and godlessness, when there is no hope for home or time for tears, when there is only you and the ocean and the air, it is comforting. The wine-colored water is impossibly dark, crystalline and ravaging.

The steadiness of land, calm and solid and real, doesn’t exist on the water and however far you go there will always be a grain of sand to call you back. A lot happens out on the water that can not be accounted for. Sometimes boat disappear, people disappear, time disappears. There is nothing about water that will hold time and when you dip your blood-soaked fingers into the ocean it will clean them and your memories and leave you with nothing.

The woman who lives on the ocean is left with nothing. Nothing, but her boat made of rust, her blood-soaked fingers, and her salt-covered skin. She is lost at sea with no anchor. Years ago, this boat was full of life and fish and money, but then came an influential storm. The town was destroyed, the boat was destroyed, and the life was destroyed. Now, the town is rebuilt, her boat is rebuilt, and her blood-soaked fingers still tie perfect knots.

She doesn’t blame herself. It is impossible for her to blame anything, but god and the sea and the frailty of children. She can not feel regret or sadness or loneliness, but they sting her eyes with every salty breeze, begging for her attention. She ignores them and focuses on the beacon on the shore.

From the ocean, it is easy to focus on the hillside town. It is easy to focus on one building in particular. At the top of the hill, there is a large white house, glorious and clean and expanse. It’s surrounded by a metal fence that gleams in the sunlight and moonlight and lightning. It is always visible from the sea.

Sometimes, on certain days, there is someone standing in front of the house at the top of the hill. She is always dressed in white, always has her hair down, always staring off toward the ocean, with her toes curled into the grass. The wind loves her, more than it loves the trees or the splintered town walls. It kisses her gently, whipping her hair to side like a flag and blowing her white, linen dress in every direction.

From the pier, where she ties her line, anchors herself to the shore, touches her boat and promises to return, she sees the woman at the top of the hill move. The pale hand of the woman whose name she does not know holds something pale above her head, shimmering and flowing in the wind that carries salt and the promise of lightning. When Shaw blinks, the woman is gone, and, for just a moment, she believes in ghosts other than her own, but the shimmer is in the wind and she knows the woman was real.

Her eyes stay fixed on the sheer, long fabric, her feet stay fixed on the warped, wooden pier, and the ghosts of her tragedy stay fixed in her mind. They swirl around her, blowing her hair, asking for apologizes, and whispering their accusations. She knows better than to answer and listens instead to the waves beneath the wood. The ocean asks for nothing, but it will take anything you offer.

It has been several years since her tragedy, many years since she left this hillside town, eternities since she began her life at sea, but the wind born fabric feels like a bullet, sent by her past to destroy her and as the cloth floats higher, she is sure the ghostly woman will be the death of her. Shaw carries with her the deaths of the others and now she stares at the sheer, flowing omen of her own.

A hat, her ghosts whisper in her ears, pushing her hair passed her face, riding the wind that pushes her feet forward. The fabric is a hat, expensive and feminine and too clean for her calloused, blood-soaked fingers. Still, she reaches for it, jumps for it, catches it before it can be blown out to sea. It is a woman’s hat.

As her feet reconnect with the steady, weathered wood of the pier, she looks up at the white house on the hill. The woman is still gone, the house is still there, and now the bullet meant for her is clasped gently in her hands. The hat is linen, large and beautiful. A long silken scarf hangs from it, the flowing fabric to which the wind had latched.

She knows who owns this hat. The woman who wears it is not the owner, not of the hat or the house or herself. Shaw knows to whom the woman belongs. This knowledge, and the insistence of her ghosts, their cold hands lifting her feet, tugging on her sleeves, moves her forward. She will return this hat to its owner.

He saved you, her ghosts whisper as her feet take careful steps on the twisted boards, avoid the holes, move around the weak spots. He saved you, bought you this boat, pays for your clothes and your food and your crime. He saved you.

Her eyes blink against the salty air, the breeze stinging them, splashing her face with water from the impending storm, and she pretends that she can cry. He saved her from himself, she thinks to her ghosts. He saved her from himself and he saved her for himself. Now, she brings fish and money to him and he brings his pain to another.

She glances at the house again as the pier and her confidence fade into sand. The land resists her, lets her stay above the surface, move inland towards the hillside town. When she left, she ran, but now she strides forward, calmly, the sand thirsty for incoming voyagers. Her ghosts follow, fingers clinging to her coat, blowing her hair, changing their tune and begging her to turn back. She ignores them, ignores her memories and her pain, thinks only of the brown-haired woman on the hill.

The woman doesn’t know her. Shaw was alone in the beginning, living in shadows and stealing to live. The church had found her, the man on the hill had found her, and she had never starved again, but she paid the price in pounds of flesh. She’s close enough to read the sign and she wonders again where she came from. The hat is soft in her hand, the wind tries to pull it away, and Shaw wants to be pulled back to the ocean.

The dark, rolling sea knows her secrets; it brought her here and it swears to take her away again. It is dangerous, to live on the sea, but it is freedom and her twice-built boat is home. The church no longer houses orphans, the man no longer beats its wards, and she no longer dreams of death. She has tasted it and come out the other side. The town’s sign creaks above her as she passes below.

The wind whistles between buildings and she tries to imagine the woman on the hill. They’re similar in age, she knows because the man used to tell her. When Shaw was small, hip high on the looming priest, he would tell her tales of his perfect daughter, compare them to each other. She knows the woman is pale, chaste and beautiful. Shaw wonders if her skin is marred with blood and bruises from his steel-boned belt.

Shaw owes that man her life and livelihood, owes him absolutely everything, but he wasn’t there when her boat sank, when her passengers died, when she was left with nothing. The woman on the hill was; she’d watched, and Shaw had felt a kinship with the woman who was her mirror, innocent at birth and broken with time. Shaw loathed and longed for her lovely apparition.

The hat tugs her forward in time, forward to the future and the house on the hill. Her ghosts pull on her sleeves, kick up dust, point out each face in each dirty window. She doesn’t come into town, not ever, but today she walks with feigned confidence, carrying the sheer, linen headpiece like a key, and strolls past the church’s closed doors without blinking.

These people ignored her in her youth and she ignores them now. The woman on the house would thank her for the hat, perhaps welcome her in, to her house and her bed and her body. Shaw craves comfort like the ocean craves blood and the nameless brunette would owe her for her time.

The thought makes her falter and her next step is a hesitant one. There is no debt when something is freely given and dark thoughts like that have no place inside her vacant soul. She stops short of the swinging goodbye sign, the hillside looming ahead of her, and wonders what a trip to that house will bring. The ground beneath her feet has brought her to the other side of the hillside town in minutes, it is truly as small as a grain of sand, and she sucks in a breath not salty enough for her weathered lungs.

The wind sweeps her clothes around her like a prayer, her ghosts whispering options in her ear, and she begins her climb up the treacherous hill. She would apologize to the woman, she decides, taking careful steps, her ghosts at her back keeping her safe. The pale, brown-haired daughter of an angry god did nothing to earn her perpetual pain.

Shaw had not thought of the woman for a second when she’d made her deal with the devil, taken his money and his boat, taken to the sea. There had been no fleeting thought to where his punishment would land now that she was wrapped in wool and salt and iron. His pale daughter bore the fruits of Shaw’s labors and the fruits of her steel-boned loyalty.

When the hat was handed over, and the woman had thanked her, Shaw would ask to come inside, explain the past, stay for tea. Perhaps inside the house, it is quiet; there are no ghosts or storms or howling wind. It was a favor that she was doing and perhaps a favor she was earning. Even blood-soaked tragedies long for safe harbor.

Her foot slips beneath her and she stumbles, the hat falls from her hand, her knees crash to the rocky hillside. She is bleeding, she thinks, her knees are torn open like the side of her boat and a parade of memories slides before her eye. The wind and her ghosts scream in her ears, but the hat lands in front of her, born on some kinder draft. She is grounded again.

A deep, shaky breath taken in brings clarity and Shaw stands, steady once more. She sweeps the hat from the dirt, brushes it off, holds it gently. Ahead of her, the wrought iron gate that serves as her lighthouse gleams in the afternoon sun.

She has arrived at the gate to the house on the hill with bleeding knees and empty soul and stands on the precipice of the cliff and the past. The gate squeaks, loud in the wind, and her ghosts try to push her off the edge, push her to safety, push her to death. Her boots sink into the soft, damp grass as she crosses the threshold and enters the gate in which her ghostly woman is trapped.

Her fist knocks sharply on the front door and she waits with baited breath. This moment will define her future; she will meet the woman on the other side of the world and either sweep her away to the sea or join her in her house of stone. The door unlocks, the knob turns, and Shaw is left facing the result of fate.

The priest looks down at her from his brick and mortar doorway, the house behind him silent and dark. She sees no woman, no glimpse of pale hope, no person to long for, but she sees her tormenter-turned-benefactor and she holds out his hat.

“This came to me,” she says, her voice like stone beneath a steel-toed boot, and knows she has made a mistake. “On the wind.”

His eyes are empty, hollow and dark, and his hand is withered and blood-stained like hers. The hat is soft in her hands as it is torn from them and her ghosts whisper that this is for the best. A soft thump sounds and she looks past her angry god. Behind the embodiment of holy corruption, at the top of the stairs, framed by white light streaming through a door open like invitation, is a woman, white linen dress hanging open at her waist, deliberately painted black and blue.

Her face is stained with fear and despair and for a moment, for a brief second, for just one, single, impossibly slow heart beart, Shaw considers killing her benefactor, baptizing herself in his blood, and taking the woman from his house and his hands and his bottomless eyes, building a life together on the sea.

Then, she remembers her debt, the ghosts at her back, the oath she has taken to serve this church and this house and this inevitable god. She nods, just once, her eyes blink against a salt-streaked breeze and she turns her back on the house and the man and the woman in white. To help this girl would mean betraying her loyalties and Shaw is nothing if not loyal to those she owes.

The door slams loud behind her, closing the door to a path not taken, and she does not jump because she can not jump. In front of her, the ghosts of her tragedy open the gleaming gate, and she runs for her wooden harbor and rusted boat and blood-soaked ocean home. 

When she unties her boat, races off for deep waters, tries to escape her latest wrong choice, a new ghost joins her flock. It stands on the bow, stares back towards the shore and Shaw thinks it is painted black and blue. Its whisper flies on the wind and lands in her ears.

"Thank you for taking me away."


End file.
